[OSM-dev] OSM Notes API, Issue Tracking (was: "See Data", a UI for browsing OSM data in the main map)

[Laurence Penney]

> What I would rather not see is people using it to add permanent
> notes about places - if that information is worth having then it
> should probably be properly encoded as tags on some object.

How about we call it 'geochat' or 'osmchat'? A chat thread is started  
at a particular place & time. Chat readers would look at a set of user- 
defined bboxes (defaulting to a single 1km x 1km box around one's  
home), and show the 10 chat threads with the latest activity, maybe  
ignoring stuff older than user-specified cut-off.

Calling it 'chat' makes it more obvious that that the chat messages  
themselves shouldn't go in the main db. However it would be nice to be  
able to obtain a list of chat threads for an area easily, and if that  
means auto-inserting nodes tagged chat=<ChatID> into the main db that  
sounds ok to me.

- L